beinaheleidenschaftgegenstand

Howard Gardner CG

Beinaheleidenschaftgegenstand - Dead Air

A music promo video that I animated for an industrial/ambient noise band. I worked solo on this and was allowed full creative control of the project (although I did send the band regular rushes of the footage I was creating, just to make sure they were happy with the direction it was going in). After drawing out some initial ideas I began constructing and animating the models in December 2014. Work was put on the backburner between February and May due to a large volume of other projects but was completed in late May 2015.

The modelling work was done with Maya and Mudbox and utilised a large number of realworld images and textures which I capturede myself with an SLR and edited in Photoshop. The layers were composited using Nuke and After Effects and the final edit was assembled in Adobe Premier.

Above: a wireframe of the environment I built for the video. I was trying to evoke the feel of an abandoned bunker.

Below: interactive showing a work-in-progress version of one of the complex's strange inhabitants.

In late June 2015 I completed a second version of the video, this one being for Non-Bio's remix of the track. The remix is about one minute longer than the original version and this presented further challenges because additional footage needed to be animated and edited with the existing video to fill up all the run-time. Since the original video showed a complete series of camera tracks through the 3D building layout, some additional corridor sets had to be constructed (or rather existing ones had to be re-dressed!) so that existing locations didn't end up getting shown repeatedly.

I decided that for the remix video I would also try a different editing style, one which makes the flow of locations seem less linear. I also intercut the shots with my own stock footage of analogue and digital video distortion* and some entirely new rotating shots of a beating heart within a ribcage, which I animated in Maya using public domain anatomical models.

* I generated all this using a device which I circuit-bent myself called the Video Beetle.

I decided quite early on to avoid a sci-fi or fantasy setting such as I'd used for X-KiN's In Vein. Instead I wanted to make a believable-looking - if rather bleak - urban setting and then juxtapose it with a collection of strange and mis-shapen beings (or statues?) to create a creeping sense of unease for the viewer.